CLEVELAND, Ohio – Abortion is a medical issue, women’s rights issue, family issue and moral issue. And early in this year’s race for Ohio governor, it is the issue.

Democrats and their likely candidate, Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald, have made it so with their moves and their messaging in the first weeks of 2014.

The state party’s new ground game coordinator spent 2013 in Virginia, where she assisted a winning gubernatorial bid that emphasized the Republican candidate’s hardline positions on abortion. FitzGerald’s new running mate, Sharen Neuhardt, ran twice for Congress but is known as well in political circles for being an abortion-rights activist.

The pieces weave together to form a “War on Women” narrative against Republican Gov. John Kasich. But the strategy brings some risks and no promise of rewards.

Data and research from political scientists show that the hot-button topic rarely tips an election to one candidate or another. Voters tend to place more importance on the economy and other matters when making their decisions, and those with strong opinions on abortion likely have aligned already with the party that shares their beliefs.

“Most people do not rate social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage as a very high priority,” said John Green, a professor and director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. “They have opinions on them, and Ohio is pretty evenly divided on them, but most people don’t put those issues front and center.”

For their book “The Gamble,” political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck concluded that Democrats’ emphasis on women’s health, particularly abortion and birth control, was not a significant factor in President Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012.

Vavreck, a Middleburg Heights native and an associate professor at the University of California Los Angeles, believes the same will be true in Ohio’s gubernatorial race.

“They’re trying to really play up this ‘War on Women’ thing,” Vavreck said. “I think in many ways, that seems like a promising way forward for these Democratic candidates who think they can peel women away from the Republican Party. But any woman who is going to be compelled by these arguments has already sorted onto the Democratic side.”

This thinking helps explain how Democrats are framing the debate in Ohio.

Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols said the governor opposes abortion except in cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is in danger. Compared with Cuccinelli, it’s not so hard a line. But FitzGerald and his supporters believe the better indicator of Kasich’s stance is in the state budget he signed last summer – a spending plan that contained several anti-abortion regulations and cut public funding for Planned Parenthood.

“It’s a radical re-envisioning of our health care system,” said Lauren Harmon, the Ohio Democratic Party ground game coordinator recently arrived from Virginia.

FitzGerald saw in the budget measures a political opening. He called on Ohioans last year to organize a repeal effort, one that might have boosted voter turnout this fall. He later backed away from the initiative, after the American Civil Liberties Union stepped in with a legal challenge. Neuhardt, meanwhile, led a Statehouse protest of the restrictions long before she came to FitzGerald’s attention as a prospective lieutenant governor.

“When women are healthy, that helps families, and that helps everything associated with Ohio,” Neuhardt said last week by telephone. “This relationship is between a woman and her doctor. I don’t think politicians should be telling women what they can and can’t do.”

Democrats are careful to broaden their argument the way Neuhardt has. They prefer the terms “women’s reproductive issues” and “women’s health” and scold reporters who use “abortion” as shorthand. They assert, for example, that cuts to Planned Parenthood are disturbing because the clinics provide other care, including breast-cancer screenings.

The strategy is not so much about telling voters that Kasich is anti-abortion – a fact they likely already know and have factored into their decision. The strategy, at least in part, is to win over some independents and Republicans by making Kasich unpalatable. Put another way: Abortion is one thing, but who opposes access to life-saving tests?

GOP: ‘Women’s health’ code for ‘abortion’

Kasich’s allies believe this is an unfair reading of his record. This is the governor, they stress, who pushed to expand Medicaid coverage in Ohio at the risk of upsetting base conservatives. Doing so opens up health care to many more low-income women.

“What a champion of women’s health he’s become,” said State Rep. Dorothy Pelanda, a Marysville Republican. “Our governor’s undying quest for Medicaid expansion and its realization make the idea he’s hosting a war on women nothing but hollow propaganda.”

Pelanda and other Republicans also note that the state budget dedicated funding for rape crisis centers, but only if they don’t refer women for abortions. House Democrats had problems with the so-called gag rule when it was included in a previous bill, but they unanimously supported the measure in hopes of a compromise in the budget.

“Not a single provision in the state budget banned or outlawed abortion,” said Pelanda, who opposes abortion. “As an educated woman, I looked at those provisions as providing more information to women so they could make better decisions on their health care.”

As for other care that Democrats say is in jeopardy because of cuts to public Planned Parenthood funding, Republicans point to a Kasich program that pledges more state funding to breast- and cervical-cancer screenings and other medical services.

Republicans, though, don’t buy the nuanced messaging that the Democrats have built around “women’s health.” They believe it all boils down to abortion. And if anyone is too extreme on that issue, they contend, it’s FitzGerald, not Kasich and the GOP.

“When Democrats say ‘women’s health,’ that’s code for abortion on demand,” said Ohio Right to Life President Mike Gonidakis. “All Ed FitzGerald has talked about is abortion.”

Parties play to their bases

Polls show that Americans generally favor abortion rights but are less supportive of the procedure in the later stages of pregnancy. FitzGerald, when asked after the recent Planned Parenthood endorsement if he had any exceptions, sidestepped, according to the Columbus Dispatch, saying such decisions should between a woman and her doctor.

Ohio Republican Party spokesman Chris Schrimpf said FitzGerald’s answer suggests that he “believes in no limits whatsoever, which makes him far outside the mainstream.”

Pressed for more specifics last week, a FitzGerald spokesman declined, calling the county executive’s previous response to the limitations question a “very clear statement.”

Republicans also have criticized FitzGerald for choosing Neuhardt as his running mate.

“Her only resume-building item that I can see is that she was on the board of Planned Parenthood” in the Dayton area, said Gonidakis, who a moment later added: “Sharen Neuhardt was talking about her anatomy at her introductory news conference.”

“Doesn’t it kind of look like a dog chasing its tail at this point?” she said in response to Gonidakis and other Republicans fond of reminding reporters about the remark.

Neuhardt’s punchy debut, and the GOP response, illustrates another reality in this debate. The rhetoric rallies both parties. And therein lies the risk for Democrats: In energizing their base, they energize their opponents’. At best, they might cancel out each other.

So if, as political science suggests, this messaging does nothing more than calcify opinions and voting intentions on both sides, will Democrats see any rewards?

That depends on what happens on the ground. Besides Harmon, the state party recently hired Jennah Craig, a veteran of Ohio campaigns, to direct its Women’s Caucus. Craig said women activists and voters are the first group the party is organizing this year.

That, said Vavreck, the political scientist from UCLA, could promote higher turnout.

“The first thing that jumps out to me, in theory is that groups like this tend to have good networks,” Vavreck said. “It’s an already-made base of volunteers to go canvass, leaflet, do vote drives. There there’s what I would call group spillover. Planned Parenthood and abortion-rights groups are friends with the gay equality groups. This could be about getting a group together that can go out and change the vote by 3 to 5 points.”

Follow Us

cleveland.com is powered by Plain Dealer Publishing Co. and Northeast Ohio Media Group. All rights reserved (About Us).The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Northeast Ohio Media Group LLC.